Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Jumping Off Cliffs Is Our Core Competency

Lemmings. It's what we always were, and always will be. We don't fly from trees using skin flaps. We don't lie in the water and wash stuff with our adorable paws. We do exactly one thing, and we do it extremely well. We herd up and jump off some goddamn cliff for no reason whatsoever.

We've become cultural icons doing this. But if we stop now, we're dead. Not literally dead. That's going to happen anyway, in about fifteen minutes. But the idea of lemmings will be dead. We could experiment with a different brand identity, a whole new strategy to reach people. But we risk losing everything that lemmings stand for. We're not prairie dogs and we never will be. Trying to act like them is just... suicidal. That's not what lemmings represent. Wait. No, actually it is what we represent. But not like this, people. Not like this.

If you're some NatGeo producer, and you've just packed hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment into a Jeep to drive up through Crackfreeze, Norway to film some lemmings, what kinds of footage are you looking to capture? Burrowing and foraging? No, my friends. You can go to PetSmart and watch a couple of friggin' gerbils do that crap. You're looking to see wave after wave of beady-eyed kamikazes dive off some jagged rocks and disappear into the foamy surf. I, for one, want to give those people what they came out here for.

You think we can play around with our image and there will be no consequences? You think the meerkats aren't right behind us, looking to steal everything we've built and cash it in with some Dreamworks piece of shit? We have the jumping-off-cliffs franchise. No one else has the tiny furry balls to do what we do as well as we can. But that takes focus. Integrity. If we don't rededicate ourselves to this -- every day, every season, every psychotic leap off every piece of rock -- someone will come along and take our throne.

You gonna let them do that?! Huh?! You gonna let some fucking voles come into our house and show us how to hurtle to our deaths? I didn't think so.

Sexual fantasies, desperation...

...cat-sitting... The Big Money is about these things. And also love, loneliness, the Spider Demon at the end of Doom, and working at a fashion magazine.It is true in the emotional, but not legally actionable sense.Buy it on Kindle......or Nook.